Roku Launches Free Movie Streaming Channel

Amazon, Apple, and Google all want to sell you media streaming hardware so that you'll also buy streaming media from them, or do other things that earn money within their ecosystems. Roku, on the other hand, is quite happy selling us media boxes, sticks, and even TVs. And now choosing Roku comes with the added bonus of hundreds of free movies to watch.

Today, Roku announced the introduction of The Roku Channel. It's a new channel available to all Roku players and Roku TVs within the US. Loading it up will present the viewer with access to hundreds of movies, which they can watch for free thanks to each of them being ad-supported. If you don't like adverts, then this isn't the channel for you.

The movies on offer have been sourced from major studios including Lionsgate, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Warner Brothers, and will join existing content on the Roku platform provided by American Classics, FilmRise, Popcornflix, Vidmark, and YuYu.

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According to TechCrunch, Roku signed licensing deals with the studios in order to gain access to a new selection of popular movies. Now it needs to sell ad space around them to turn this into a profitable venture. It's also expected that the number of studios signing up, and therefore the amount of content available, will grow over time.

If you access your Roku device and can't see the new Roku Channel, don't worry, it's coming. Roku decided to mirror what it does with software updates and carry out a phased roll out to current generation hardware. That's going to take a few weeks to be completed.

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In recent days, word about Nvidia’s new Turing architecture started leaking out of the Santa Clara-based company’s headquarters. So it didn’t come as a major surprise that the company today announced during its Siggraph keynote the launch of this new architecture and three new pro-oriented workstation graphics cards in its Quadro family.
Nvidia describes the new Turing architecture as “the greatest leap since the invention of the CUDA GPU in 2006.” That’s a high bar to clear, but there may be a kernel of truth here. These new Quadro RTx chips are the first to feature the company’s new RT Cores. “RT” here stands for ray tracing, a rendering method that basically traces the path of light as it interacts with the objects in a scene. This technique has been around for a very long time (remember POV-Ray on the Amiga?). Traditionally, though, it was always very computationally intensive, though the results tend to look far more realistic. In recent years, ray tracing got a new boost thanks to faster GPUs and support from the likes of Microsoft, which recently added ray tracing support to DirectX.
“Hybrid rendering will change the industry, opening up amazing possibilities that enhance our lives with more beautiful designs, richer entertainment and more interactive experiences,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. “The arrival of real-time ray tracing is the Holy Grail of our industry.”
The new RT cores can accelerate ray tracing by up to 25 times compared to Nvidia’s Pascal architecture, and Nvidia claims 10 GigaRays a second for the maximum performance.
Unsurprisingly, the three new Turing-based Quadro GPUs will also feature the company’s AI-centric Tensor Cores, as well as 4,608 CUDA cores that can deliver up to 16 trillion floating point operations in parallel with 16 trillion integer operations per second. The chips feature GDDR6 memory to expedite things, and support Nvidia’s NVLink technology to scale up memory capacity to up to 96GB and 100GB/s of bandwidth.
The AI part here is more important than it may seem at first. With NGX, Nvidia today also launched a new platform that aims to bring AI into the graphics pipelines. “NGX technology brings capabilities such as taking a standard camera feed and creating super slow motion like you’d get from a $100,000+ specialized camera,” the company explains, and also notes that filmmakers could use this technology to easily remove wires from photographs or replace missing pixels with the right background.
On the software side, Nvidia also today announced that it is open sourcing its Material Definition Language (MDL).
Companies ranging from Adobe (for Dimension CC) to Pixar, Siemens, Black Magic, Weta Digital, Epic Games and Autodesk have already signed up to support the new Turing architecture.
All of this power comes at a price, of course. The new Quadro RTX line starts at $2,300 for a 16GB version, while stepping up to 24GB will set you back $6,300. Double that memory to 48GB and Nvidia expects that you’ll pay about $10,000 for this high-end card.

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